Fucking politicians—The consequences of having donated to the Ron Paul political campaign

Back in 2008, I made a terrible mistake—I donated to the Ron Paul political campaign.

Why a mistake? Because Ron Paul proceeded to sell or pass on my email address to a multitude of conservative politicians and causes, who in turn did the something—resulting in a snowballing, unstoppable, never-ending flood of conservative, donation-seeking, nearly-always-irrelevant political spam arriving in my email inbox.During the six years since 2008, I’ve received several hundreds of these emails. Although the email always contain donation links, they never contact details for the originator. Normally, they come from “Super PACs”, whose website lists PO Box mailing addresses. (The politicians themselves rarely send the emails, instead relying on these opaque SuperPACs).

The footer of these emails always contain the legally-required unsubscribe links, but of course clicking those is futile; by the time you even see that link, your email address has already been passed on to other organizations.

And here’s what’s most insidious: The footers often contains links to learn how your email address ended up on the mailing list. I’ve clicked a few of those, and here’s what I’m shown:

These fuckers have the nerve to claim that I actually opted-in—in this particular case signing up to their list less than 20 days ago on March 2.

Of course, it’s not the having to deal with these emails that makes me so angry. Rather, it’s that having donated my own money to some politician, the response—the “thank you”, if you will—has been utter disrespect and disregard for my privacy.

I wish so badly there was an economical way in which an individual such as myself could exact consequences on these organizations for their actions. Perhaps I could pay a lawyer to start a legal proceeding, ultimately forcing them to admit I didn’t sign up or otherwise opt-in. But what would be the consequences of that?—a lot of legal costs for me, and a “don’t do that again” statement to them?

I’m going to document all this spam in the following running list:

Update: 2014-03-21 Spam from Walter Jones, a congressman representing North Carolina’s 3rd District:

Update: 2014-04-02 Spam from Chris Day:

Update: 2014-04-29 Spam from the Black Conservatives Fund:

Update: 2014-05-07 Spam from this dude that’s going to save us all with a cannon and musket, John Stone

Update: 2014-05-09 Spam from the AMAC

Update: 2014-05-13 Spam from Scott “The Horny Badger” Gessler

Update: 2014-05-30 Spam from the city of Denver, in case I’m concerned my vote wasn’t registered.

Update: 2014-06-11 Spam from IJReview, to fellow “activists”.

Update: 2014-06-19 Spam from Rand Paul. A “personal” appeal beginning with “Dear %%FIRST%%”. Note this closes the circle, beginning with father and finally arriving to son.

Update: 2014-06-20 Spam again from Liberty for All. I guess they didn’t feel like processing my unsubscribe request when I first posted this blog back in the day.

Update: 2014-06-22 Spam again from IJReview.

Update: 2014-07-10 An “important” spam from typography-challenged Tennessee Republican candidate, Joe Carr.

Update: 2014-07-10 Lucky me, two on the same day. This spam from Mississippi senate candidate Ted Cruz, who’s calling for a “redo” of the runoff elections due to vote fraud.

Update: 2014-07-13 Spam from another PAC; this one wanting to defeat Kay Hagan.

Update: 2014-07-22 Full circle all the way back to Ron Paul again, trying to give away a machine gun. I unsubscribed from that motherfucker’s list multiple times now, so I’m pretty sure his sending this mail was illegal. But how can you prove you unsubscribed?

Update: 2014-08-28 Oh my—the funniest one yet. The College Republican National Committee’s spam generator seems to have a rather unfortunate bug.

Update: 2014-08-30 Wow, maybe it wasn’t a bug. Just got this spam from Congressman Steve King.

Update: 2014-09-11 And here’s an exciting one from the Association of Mature American Citizens.

Update: 2014-09-13 Ron Paul, wanting to give me an AR-15.

Update: 2014-09-25 Spam from Mike Lee.

Update: 2016-01-21

Update: 2016-01-27 Students for the Concealed Carry Foundation

Update: 2016-01-30 Iowa caucus

Update: 2016-01-31 Something related to gun ownership

Update: 2016-02-02 More from Marco

Update: 2016-02-14

Update: 2016-05-17

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